Haruki: Snowed in Food Shelter
Klanggold
Having previously appeared on The Land Of and Hibernate, Haruki (Ghent, Belgium-based Boris Snauwaert) now contributes a half-hour set to Germany's Klanggold imprint. Snauwaert's electroacoustic settings are amorphous pieces that unfold in understated and organic fashion. The material floats freely and exploratively, indifferent to notions of conventional compositional form. The Haruki sound is pitched midway between acoustic and electronic musics, with fragments of the former embedded within subtly shaped textural fields of the latter. The merest trace of a clarinet surfaces during “A Chair is for Reaching Out,” for example, the instrument's immediately recognizable sound overshadowed by the threads of electronic noise gathering around it.
In the opening “Animals All Over the Table,” bucolic string plucks resound, so forcefully they manage to be heard clearly amidst a blizzard of gritty static; a few piano notes surface near the end too, which in turn sets the stage for the subsequent “Your Flowers Are Dripping” where low-pitched piano notes rumble through passageways of granular fuzz and ambient noise. In comparison to the hermetic world conjured by “There Are Things We Should Have Talked About,” “How to Bend Over in Five Movements” paints a desolate landscape patched with icy surfaces and frosted tones that grows ever more portentous as it inches towards its close. In keeping with the hibernation association provoked by the release's title, Snowed in Food Shelter exudes an introspective quality, preferring to remain low-level and modest in dynamic contrast.October 2010